Americans’ Average Internet Speed Spiked 40% in the Last Year

by
Sy Mukherjee

@FortuneMagazine

August 4, 2016, 6:39 PM EDT

Good news, web surfers—your Internet speeds got a whole lot faster over the past year.

A new report from web analytics firm Speedtest finds the average American broadband customer’s download speed spiked 42% since July 2015, reaching a record level of nearly 55 megabits per second (Mbps). Upload speeds posted even more impressive gains with a 51% improvement in the past year.

“The typical fixed broadband consumer in the U.S. saw average download speeds greater than 50 Mbps for the first time ever during the first six months of 2016, topping out at 54.97 Mbps in June,” wrote the study authors.

So which telecom companies dominate when it comes to providing the best surfing experience? The answer differs significantly based on if you’re talking about downloads and uploads. Comcast cmcsa XFINITY blows away the competition when it comes to average download speed at 126 Mbps, with Cox and Spectrum following closely behind at 118 Mbps and 114 Mbps, respectively. But Cox could soon displace Comcast for the top spot judging by its impressive 35% speed boost between April and June of this year.

The fiber optic Verizon vz Fios service is a clear outlier in the report. It’s the only ISP whose average upload speeds actually edge its download speeds (94 Mbps versus 88 Mbps). CenturyLink ctl has the worst fixed broadband download figures (40 Mbps) while AT&T t U-verse has the worst uploads (7 Mbps).

Average mobile speeds are also on their way up, according to Speedtest.

Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile tmus are nearly neck-and-neck in that arena with download speeds of 21.11 Mbps and 21.02 Mbps, respectively. Even Sprint s , which remains at the back of the major wireless provider pack, clocked in at about 15 Mbps. The advent of 5G mobile Internet is also likely to shift that market’s landscape, although these improvements are unlikely to become evident until 2020.

Speedtest praised the improvements but warned that there’s still much work left to be done. The firm says that ISP consolidation could be a barrier to improving speeds down the line, although that may be counteracted by the American consumer’s “insatiable” appetite for faster speeds.

For more on 5G, watch our video.

“Competition is a good thing, and while we’re seeing faster performance than ever before, the Internet in the U.S. could certainly improve,” wrote the report authors, pointing out the U.S. still ranks just 20th in fixed broadband and 42nd in mobile Internet performance globally.

The recent gains in Internet speed were also unevenly dispersed across the U.S. Speedtest noted that a recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report found that, while just 10% of Americans don’t have access to Internet that meets the agency’s new target standard of 25 Mbps downloads and 3 Mbps uploads, nearly four times as many people in rural regions don’t enjoy that level of speed.

Working glass at Corning

@FortuneMagazine

May 6, 2013, 12:59 PM EDT

To make glass is to know failure. A glassmaker begins with powders of oxides, stirring them into a platinum crucible, then sticking the batch in an oven heated to 2,912° F, where the oxides liquefy into a molten state. He then removes the crucible, and the liquid cools and hardens into glass — an amorphous solid. A team analyzes its chemical makeup and “seeds” (a.k.a. bubbles). But to really know glass, to get a sense of its strength, you must break it. So someone bends and hammers and sometimes throws baseballs at the glass until it scratches or cracks or shatters. He studies the fractures, which reveal the glass’s secrets. Glass fails, the researchers learn from the failure, and the cycle repeats.

The making and breaking and remaking of glass has been happening for 162 years at Corning. One of Corning’s early customers was Thomas Edison, who needed a way to mass-manufacture his incandescent lights. The company constructed the ribbon machine — “The only machine that’s made nearly every light bulb you’ve seen in your life,” says David Morse, Corning’s chief technology officer. Morse arrived at Corning’s upstate New York headquarters (the town is a company town; it bears the company name) 36 years ago to work on creating glass that would respond to light.

Soon Morse’s work shifted to telecom. In the 1970s Corning began developing glass tubes that could carry information in pulses of light: fiber optics. As the Internet rose, so did Corning’s stock. But then the dotcom bubble burst, and the company found itself in need of another hit. Serendipitously, Steve Jobs called. He wanted a thin and very strong glass for Apple’s new smartphone. And he wanted it in production in six months. Corning (No. 326 on the Fortune 500) dusted off and modified an old project it had first pitched to the auto industry 50 years earlier, modified it, and ended up with Gorilla Glass, a line that nearly all glass touchscreens are made of today. Sales have doubled every year since it was first introduced in 2008.

Glass can be made even thinner, stronger, better. Teams at Corning are embedding inorganic, bacteria-killing ions into glass; making bendable glass so thin it can be rolled up in great spools; and designing a new type of fiber-optic cable that can carry cellphone signals and pick up Wi-Fi. “The scale of glass, what you can do with it today — it’s wonderfully different,” Morse says.

This story is from the May 20, 2013 issue of Fortune.

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